UCL DEPARTMENT OF SPACE & CLIMATE PHYSICS

ExoMars Landing Sites Narrowed Down - And PanCam Appears on BBC News

7 April 2014

The first landing site selection workshop for the Esa-Roscosmos
ExoMars rover was held on 26-28 March at ESAC near Madrid. Prof Andrew Coates
of the Planetary Science Group attended the meeting, as Principal Investigator
of the PanCam instrument on the rover. MSSL leads the international PanCam team
which includes hardware from Germany and Switzerland, with important
contributions from Austria, as well as the UK. PanCam includes a pair of wide
angle cameras (WACs) for stereo imaging and a High Resolution Camera (HRC) for
zoom capability. PanCam provides geological and atmospheric context for the
mission.

The selection
of the final landing site is a tricky combination of engineering
constraints and scientific interest. The heat resistant tiles and parachutes of
the landing system need enough time to operate in the thin Martian atmosphere
before a safe landing of the 300kg rover, so the landing has to be below a
certain level. Also the rover is solar powered, so the landing needs to be near
the equator. On the other hand, signs of past water, either clays –
phyllosilicates – seen form orbit, or physical features like rivers and deltas,
are good from the science point of view. The overall goal of the ExoMars
mission is to search for signs of life 3.6 billion years ago – and, for the
first time, the mission will drill up to 2m under the harsh Martian surface
environment to do this.

The locations of 8 proposed landing sites for the ExoMars 2018 mission are indicated by circles. Four sites (indicated by red circles) were favoured by scientists at the first ExoMars 2018 Landing Site Selection Workshop, held at ESA's European Space Astronomy Centre near Madrid, from 26 to 28 March 2014. These are: Mawrth Vallis (for which 2, very similar, proposals were received), Oxia Planum, Hypanis Vallis and Oxia Palus. This image was compiled by D. Loizeau for the Landing Site Selection Working Group. Copyright: ESA-Roscosmos/LSSWG/D. Loizeau

Prof Coates says ‘We had a vote on Thursday evening to
narrow the site selection from 8 to 4. It was very exciting to have a say in
this, as well as providing the PanCam perspective for the whole meeting, just
before the vote’. The chosen sites, Mawrth Vallis, Oxia Planum, Hypanis Vallis
and Oxia Palus, provide some excellent scientific targets. Peter Muller and
colleagues from the MSSL Imaging group also attended the meeting.

Meanwhile in the UK Airbus Defence & Space were opening
their new ‘Mars Yard’ for rover testing in Stevenage, and this was featured,
with a sequence shot at MSSL of a PanCam model and Prof Coates explaining the
science of the mission, on BBC News Online, BBC 1 Breakfast, BBC 1 O’clock News and BBC
World.